![pbs martin scorsese presents the blues pbs martin scorsese presents the blues](https://www.documentary.org/images/magazine/2003/SoulofaMan_Aug2003.jpg)
#Pbs martin scorsese presents the blues series#
But, like the celebrated PBS series itself, an aura of missed opportunity hangs over the entire endeavor. Not that one wishes it were some heavy academic tome. But very little print is given to political, racial, gender and social issues surrounding the music. Unlike similar collections, the book gives real props to gospel-blues pioneer Bind Willie Johnson and rightfully places fife and drum patriarch Othar Turner at the top of the blues pantheon. These selections are for the most part inspired, though one wonders why there's not even one page from Alan Greenberg’s brilliant Love in Vain screenplay, or anything from LeRoi Jones' classic Blues People. The book is loosely constructed around the seven films, and there are great writers involved, including Stanley Booth, Hilton Als, Robert Palmer, Richard Hell, Luc Sante, and Robert Gordon. With much of the material consisting of excerpts from other sources, and the lack of an index, the tome seems more like a fluffed-up set of liner notes for the accompanying DVD set and CD series than a book-and that's probably the best way to approach it. Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey is an idiosyncratic, well-produced, and relatively cheap introduction to a quintessentially American musical invention. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues is more than a timeless collection of great writing to be savored and shared: it is an unforgettable initiation into the very essence of American music and culture.
![pbs martin scorsese presents the blues pbs martin scorsese presents the blues](https://simkl.net/posters/53/53070ac778461b3_ca.jpg)
In these pages one not only reads about the blues, one hears them, feels them, lives them. The result is a unique and timeless celebration of the blues, from writers and artists as esteemed and revered as the music that moved them. Included in this stunning collection are newly commissioned essays by David Halberstam, Hilton Als, Suzan-Lori Parks, Elmore Leonard, Luc Sante, John Edgar Wideman, and others timeless archival pieces by the likes of Stanley Booth, Paul Oliver, and Mack McCormick evocative color illustrations and rare vintage photography illuminating and in-depth conversations and portraits of musicians, ranging from Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith to John Lee Hooker and Eric Clapton lyrics of legendary blues compositions personal essays by the series directors Martin Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Richard Pearce, Wim Wenders, Marc Levin, Mike Figgis, and Clint Eastwood and excerpts from such literary masters as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and William Faulkner.
![pbs martin scorsese presents the blues pbs martin scorsese presents the blues](https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000233393826-c9ttcz-t500x500.jpg)
This volume - a companion to the groundbreaking seven-part documentary series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues - represents a literary sampler every bit as vibrant and original and diverse as the films and music that inspired it. But the powerful influence of the blues, with its dramatic, artful storytelling about the elemental experience of being alive, is found in the works of some of our most important literary voices as well. Rock & roll, jazz, R&B, hip-hop: Without question, today's most popular sounds owe an incalculable debt to that uniquely American musical creation - The Blues.